Another Corporate Crony For A Top Job

In a move that is highly under-reported as the mainstream media concentrate on Miers and DeLay, the Senate is getting ready to confirm George M. Gray as the second-in-command at the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Research and Development.

The trouble is that Gray is connected with several pro-business organizations, including the Environmental Literacy Council (ELC), a nonprofit funded by a number of groups with ties to the energy, chemical and defense industries. Among the ELC’s backers are conservative operations such as the John M. Olin Foundation, Sarah Scaife Foundation and the Koch Family Foundations.

If confirmed, Gray - currently director of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis and a lecturer at the university - would be second at the EPA office that studies the science, costs and benefits behind proposed EPA rules.

In a statement yesterday, Jeff Ruch, the executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), charged that the "list of George Gray’s corporate sponsors reads like a murderer’s row of the top polluters in the country." Ruch warned that Gray is likely to expand the EPA’s use of corporate research money.

On Wednesday, PEER released records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act detailing an increasingly symbiotic relationship between the EPA and chemical companies. The organization’s program director Rebecca Rose said the agency is "becoming an arm of corporate research and development."

Since President George W. Bush took office, the EPA has nearly doubled the number of research-and-development agreements with industry associations and companies that it held during the previous administration, according to PEER. The American Chemical Council, the nation’s largest chemical industry lobby, is the agency’s biggest partner, the group noted.

While Gray seems to be well qualified scientifically, his positions have always been pro-industry, as when he testified to Congress that bans on harmful pesticides were not always warranted. He has argued against the disqualification of reviewers that had a conflict of interest in government scientific peer review procedures and was head of an assessment for the U.S. Department of Agriculture on the risk of a major outbreak of BSE back in 1998 - an assessment since disproven by events.

Furthermore, the Gray family of the Winston-Salem area of Massachusets is no stranger to the Bush administration. Lyons Gray has been tapped to be the chief financial officer of the EPA and his cousin C. Boyden Gray is in line to become the next ambassador to the European Union.

The latter, C. Boyden Gray, is a consummate Washington insider. He has clerked for Chief Justice Earl Warren, contributed thousands of dollars to Republican causes, worked at the White House for two administrations, and most recently worked to shepherd judicial nominations through the Senate. The New Republic magazine once wrote "So many different money trails lead to, by and through Gray it is bewildering." He is a former White House counsel for Bush Snr., heir to the Reynolds tobacco fortune and also co-chair of the air standards Air Quality Standards Coalition. There's also a lot more anti-environmental activity and sponsorship in his resume. Click the link for details.

Republican cronyism at its best - and the EPA gets packed with exactly those who should least be allowed to steard the environment for future generations, avid as they are to make a profit from ruining it now.